Angela Townsend

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Angela Townsend Angela Townsend is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, eleven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review‘s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, JMWW, The Offing, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning. Soil and Water

Sofia Fall

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Sofia Fall Sofia Fall is a writer from Michigan. Her work appears in places such as The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Verse Daily, and Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems About Climate Change in the U.S. She works in climate policy and communications in Seattle. Granite Basin

Emily Hall

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Emily Hall Emily Hall (she/her) is an emerging writer whose prose has appeared, or is forthcoming, in places such as Portland Review, Necessary Fiction, 100 Word Story, Cherry Tree, and Passages North. She has a PhD in contemporary Anglophone novels from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A former military brat, she’s lived all over the U.S. but currently lives in North Carolina with her husband. Misunderstandings

Melissa Rudick

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Melissa Rudick Melissa Rudick is a writer living in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vestal Review and Okay Donkey Magazine. She is currently at work on her first novel. You’ll most likely find her wherever there’s milkweed, looking for monarch eggs. Her website is www.melissarudick.com. Website: www.melissarudick.com. #ratgirlsummer

Kye Roper

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Kye Roper Kye Roper is a writer, urban planner, and researcher currently based in San Antonio, Texas, where they spend their spare time mostly trying to wrangle nieces and nephews. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in publications such as Crab Creek Review, The Pinch, Spillway, The Potomac, Ghost Ocean Magazine, as well as others. After a previous career in copywriting, Kye is currently focused on short form fiction, compiling stories for a collection-in-progress. No Posts Found!

Misunderstandings

Nonfiction Home Art by Collin Scott Misunderstandings by Emily Hall “Yet here I am, on my way, arm raised in greeting, and then I am no more.” Gabriel Josipovici,  Goldberg: Variations I. Before my husband Fausto and I made the fourteen-hour drive to Maine, he asked if we were going to scatter our dog’s ashes in the ocean there. I paused for a minute because the only time we took Nicholas to the beach he had loved it; but I couldn’t imagine saying goodbye while we watched the current take him away from us, so I said “no.”We were packing for our trip, unsure what to bring because we rarely took vacations. It was a splurge meant to help me grieve the dual losses of Nicholas and my academic career. After fourteen years of teaching college English, I had burned out, but there were no funeral rites to acknowledge my job’s end. In fact, I had spent the last year as an adjunct, so there wasn’t even an office party, just an email from my department chair saying that he thought he understood and an essay that I was writing about non-linear time and waving in Gabriel Josipovici’s novel,  Goldberg: Variations, that I buried in the bottom drawer of my desk. When Fausto and I finished packing, we got into our car, laughing nervously as we chose a playlist. We had tough-to-say-the-least childhoods, so we kept giving each other sidelong glances and asking  if we were allowed to do this , allowed to drive for days, stopping for bookstores, donuts, and coffees along the way, because we still couldn’t fathom making these choices for ourselves although we were nearly forty. Two days later, when we crossed into Maine, a place neither of us had ever seen, we waved at the welcome sign and felt a little breathless, like we’d climbed to the top of the world and knew we’d still have to come down. II. On the second night of our trip, around midnight, Fausto and I went out to our little balcony so we could hear the ocean crash. But as we settled into the faux-wicker chairs and oriented ourselves towards the sea, we realized the waves were drowned out by the sounds of birds we couldn’t identify. Their calls pierced the air, whooping and whistling unseen, while we sat in darkness so deep I hoped my body would melt away until I was just a pale pair of ears absorbing the bird cries. And as I imagined myself disappearing, I remembered a flight we took years before to visit Fausto’s family in Florida. The plane was cramped and overcrowded, but the baby on the other side of our row didn’t seem to notice. From her mother’s lap, she waved a dimpled hand at Fausto, who sat nearest to her in his aisle seat. He waved back, so she excitedly began a series of poses, holding each one for only a few seconds. She rested her chin on her hand, then shyly laid her face against her mother’s shoulder before leaping up to wave at Fausto again, her face blooming into a joyful grin. We chuckled, and her mother laughed in surprise, as if she had never seen her baby do such a thing. The rows immediately before and after us took notice, and soon they were also watching her and giggling softly. Across these rows, our laughter fused and lifted upwards like a cloud, even as our bodies sat belted in tight seats. III. In the days after Nicholas died, I kept asking Fausto when I would be done grieving. I wanted to pinpoint grief’s place in my body and root it out. “I don’t think it works like that,” Fausto would gently explain. But I wanted a hard date and decided that my grief would be over when I didn’t cry for three days in a row. The first day was always the easiest: I would get through it by weeding the garden or cleaning my kitchen cupboards. On the second, I’d feel the urge to pull up one of Nicholas’s many photos, but I would put my phone in another room and pick up a book instead. On the third day, I’d be triumphant, convinced that I had conquered my grief, and I’d boldly tell Fausto that I was ready for another pet because I had already weathered the worst of it. Then, I’d go for my nightly walk and see my neighbors who’d wave at me cheerfully as their own dogs trotted beside them. In response to their greetings, which always felt carefree and content, fat tears would roll down my cheeks, and I’d rewind the clock to give myself three more days. IV. In Cape Elizabeth, the surf was rough, as were the winds, but the ducks rose and dove unbothered. Fausto and I were watching them from our perch, a bright red picnic table outside of the Lobster Shack where we were eating greasy trays of clams and fries—we didn’t come for the food, but for the view. Now that we had finished eating, we were staring at the vast stretch of rocks before us, and when my eyes finally adjusted, I realized that one of the brown orbs in the distance wasn’t actually a duck; it was a harbor seal. I had never seen one outside of captivity before. Gasping, I pointed it out to Fausto who followed my finger towards its place in the ocean. The seal rose up, its speckled belly winking in the sun, and plunged under again. From what we could tell, it was alone. We watched it in silence, our bodies tense and eyes squinting. After the fourth time the seal surfaced, it went back under the waves and swam out of sight entirely. The seal’s sudden appearance seemed to mark the end of dinner, and we took our trays to the trash and away from the eyes of two seagulls, who moments before had raised